Submitted by
Gard on Sat, 2003-11-08 02:51.
Quake 2
Area Light - GrrandMaMa
One of the things I've always dreaded doing when building is area
lighting. I can have all of my sourced lighting up and going, all my
spot lighting and texture lighting set and done, but there are always
dark spots (usually in the center of a fairly large room with a high
ceiling.) So, the next step (for me) was to put a whole bunch of
low-brightness lights close to the floor (usually 150 brighness, about
64 units off the floor) and space them out to put a dim cover. Just
enough to put light where I need it, but not enough to overpower the
sourced lights. And then there is the matter of coloring them.
All in all, it works well, but it takes a long time to get it
just right, and it's just a general pain in the ass. There is however,
another way that gives nearly perfect coverage, and is (most
importantly) fast and easy to adjust to get it looking just right.
Let's look at a particular area.
Notice how the center of the room is dark. Now, if we were to put a
light, bright enough to cover the dark area, in the center of the dark
spot, it would flood out the sourced lighting from the lights in the
wals near the floor. So, now we have a problem just like the one I
described above, but instead of using cover lighting using point
lighting like I described above, we'll do something different -- texture
lighting. I know, that would look pretty bad to light up the floor.
Don't worry, we're not going to use the floor.
First thing we need to do is find a texture that will give
us the color we need when we light it. In this case, we'll use the
texture for the wall-mounted lights.
Next, create a brush that covers the general area, a bit
off the floor (no, I'm not going to tell you exactly how far, because
it's something you have to play with.)
You should have something like this:
Now we set the properties for the brush. Set the following flags on all faces of the brush:
light: Well, why else would we be doing this?
sky: This way it will still emit light, even though it won't be drawn
nodraw: A big light brush probably wouldn't look too good in the middle of a room
detail: Since it is a sky brush, it will be a
factor in your PVS unless this is checked, which means you'll be having
sky pop up in all kinds of wierd places. Trust me... check this
mist: If you don't check mist, people will be wondering who stuck a big clip brush in the middle of the room
Keep the light value very low.
NOTE: This will dramatically increase your QRAD3 times. Just thought I'd let you know.
Now compile it, and you should come up with something like this:
It's a subtle difference, but every little bit counts (and it looks pretty good too)
You can download the example here.
Advanced Brushes
Entity Properties